Friday, November 16, 2012

unpublished story c. fucking who cares: Shabbos

Shabbos

I start out by bringing to the fore what had gone unerupted, the song stringing its last dense welt to the closing note, and finally, a shocked child behind drawn blinds, wailing into his bedclothes, under the duvet now, and the mother downstairs preparing for Shabbos (so blind), unaware that the sun has vanished and waiting over a pair of candles, torturing herself by enforcing a limit on ritual as the night cools, as the wind picks up through the open window behind her, and scatters, rather twists her hair with caution, turns it between soft digital whips and the candles go out before they're lit; the matches won't strike; the boy upstairs continues his awful display, throwing his limbs about the bed until he's remitted from between the sheets, not wrapped in them but mundanely bundled, like a normal day's waking, until he starts with his eyes at the wall, and not noticing the mirror behind him he wipes his eyes and plunges out of bed, decamping now from that torpid war-zone of his own invention; indeed, this is what you would call acting out, the wayward alarm of that toil at which we hinted, the hint of life, the soured and shopworn grease of a grief his mother will go on to deny, despite the cuts, the veracity of his open wounds, the scars already forming--and this boy, thirteen yesterday, but younger today for all of his petulance; his mother waits for the wind to calm, less sated than ready; and the ramshackle house, which bends here and there with the first undressing of a rain, the first garment pulled of a storm, not even a threat but a curse, a curse on her androgynous name, and yet a name spoken softer than prayer, than the Amidah and the rocking which animates it, and the shuffling, a menace, which follows without regress; the wind stops, and the house collapses like its brother, but not without a word; not without a scream, a protest, a pitiful act of resistance, do I pray for the demise of her house